The Centennial Return of Stewardship to the Ecological Society of America - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 166

all its other creatures for meeting their own needs, but they also have a unique
responsibility not to destroy other species (the “kinds” that God had declared to be
good) or undermine the health (ecosystem functionality) and beauty of the whole
creation. This interpretation of “dominion,” the Stewardarians point out, is confi rmed
in Genesis 2:15 where it is written that God put Adam (the fi rst human) into the
Garden of Eden (Nature) “to dress it and to keep it.”
The ESA's current presidential stewardship initiative, with its religious over-
tones, returns the ESA to some of the most important extra-scientifi c values present
at its founding. Note that Shelford, the ESA's fi rst president, consistently character-
izes “First Class Research Reserves” as “Nature Sanctuaries ,” endowing them with
a kind of holy aura. Leopold, the ESA's thirty-second president, carries forward the
science of ecology's perennial reverential romance with Nature, but less in a Judeo-
Christian than in a neo-pagan modality.
Further, while the superorganismic paradigm has been long abandoned at tradi-
tional scales of ecological study, it too has been revived at the planetary scale.
Ecosystems were once thought to be (a) closed; (b) self-regulating; (c) tending
toward a single point of stable equilibrium, (d) through determinant and invariant
successional pathways; (e) with disturbances as exceptional and exogenous events,
(f) most of which were due to external human activities (Pickett and Ostfeld 1995 ).
Now they are thought to be (a) open to nutrients, pollutants, and motile organisms;
(b) subject to external (often distant) as well as internal regulatory regimes; (c) capa-
ble of tending toward multiple domains of ecological attraction and (d) manifest
directionless and endless successional change; (e) to incorporate natural disturbances
some of which constitute disturbance regimes; (f) to also incorporate human infl u-
ences everywhere for millennia; and (g) to have indeterminate spatial and temporal
boundaries set by the scientists who investigate them (Pickett and Ostfeld 1995 ).
At the scale of the single, integrated planetary ecosystem , the Earth's biosphere
exhibits many of the characteristics of the erstwhile organismic ecosystems in the
tradition of Clements, Shelford, Leopold, and Odum (Margulis 1998 ). The Earth is
readily and unambiguously bounded; its atmosphere excludes much (otherwise
lethal) incident ultraviolent radiation and burns up small meteorites before they
reach the surface—so it is closed; its magnetic fi eld channels the charged particles
of cosmic radiation and the solar wind to the poles and thus prevents the atmosphere
from being stripped away; the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the
oceans is internally regulated, as is Earth's average temperature; and until relatively
recently (from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution), humans have had little
effect on these planetary-scaled ecological processes—the chemical composition of
the atmosphere and oceans, the ozone membrane in the stratosphere, global average
temperature, global biogeochemical cycles (Zalasiewicz and Williams 2012 ).
And for nearly half a century the biosphere—the planetary ecosystem—has been
swathed in a religious aura, having been baptized in the name of a Greek goddess,
Gaia, by James Lovelock ( 1972 ).